


And I don’t need no house, no car (I have your hand and all you are)

by SquaresAreNotCircles



Series: Five hundred hours [1]
Category: Hawaii Five-0 (2010)
Genre: Coda, Fix-It, Gen, Happy Ending, Light Angst, Steve McGarrett Has Emotions (And PTSD) And That’s Okay, canon made them talk! i was so proud i made them talk even more!, canon-typical levels of romantic undertones but can be read as platonic, h50 episode 10.21, h50 season 10
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:08:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23388499
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SquaresAreNotCircles/pseuds/SquaresAreNotCircles
Summary: “You sure you’re okay?” Steve asks, watching Danny hold the improvised cold compress to the side of his face.“I’m great.” He adjusts the peas. He’ll have to keep his right eye closed, but it’s worth it if it means keeping it from turning black, blue or any other color his skin usually isn’t. “Why would you ask?”Or: Steve has some mommy issues. Danny has some Steve-related anxieties. They’re them, so they work it out.
Relationships: Steve McGarrett & Danny "Danno" Williams, Steve McGarrett/Danny "Danno" Williams
Series: Five hundred hours [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1683592
Comments: 47
Kudos: 284





	And I don’t need no house, no car (I have your hand and all you are)

**Author's Note:**

> Sooo after watching the episode, I decided I was not going to write 10.21 fic and instead wait for 10.22 to air to see how things play out before I try to add my version(s) of events. You’re reading this, so you may already have an inkling that I failed at that. The main problem was that I’ve wanted to write fic about Steve leaving his parents’ house behind for at least a year and I had a whole series loosely planned and then Danny moved in with Steve and now suddenly Steve is talking about leaving, and it all just worked out way too well in ways that had nothing to do with my original plans but still linked to the core of the idea, so now here’s some fic about Steve making a choice and Danny being along for the ride (and the emotional support).
> 
> Also! Seeing as I have no idea what will happen next Friday in the very last episode ever, this is very probably going to be very canon divergent very soon. I’m assuming canon will actually want to _do_ something with all of the plot threads they’ve thrown at us, instead of taking a pair of scissors and going “snip!” and giving Steve and Danny (and the rest of the team) a relatively easy happy end, which is essentially what I’m doing here.
> 
> Context, if needed: this fic picks up exactly where 10.21 left off, which is with Steve and Danny in the McGarrett living room. They have just had a difficult talk out on the beach about Steve needing a break from essentially everything, after which Danny headed inside to get another beer, found a guy trying to rob Steve, had a fight with said guy until the guy made a run for it, and was then found by Steve, who realized that the burglar had taken the envelope that Doris’s mysterious, undecipherable last message arrived in. But ho! Steve had the actual message on him, so nothing useful was stolen.

With Steve engrossed, once again, by a mystery Doris left him and that some people are willing to pay for in blood – Danny’s blood, no less – Danny is left to his own devices to clean up the mess. He takes what he’s pretty sure is a bloody nose to the bathroom mirror, where he gets a nice view of the cut above his right eye that’s bleeding, too. Nothing bad, except for how all of this is bad, because none of it should ever have happened. Most people’s dead moms don’t leave them dangerous letters in their will that stipulate they should be sent just after the mourning period is finally over. Both of Danny’s parents are still alive, bless them, but this is something he’s really damn sure doesn’t take any personal experience to figure out. 

He leaves the bathroom with two of Steve’s extensive collection of adhesive bandages stuck to his face. He hobbles into the kitchen, gets himself a bag of peas and a tea towel to wrap them in, and rejoins Steve in the living room, who’s taken a seat on the couch. The area around the desk in the back of the room is still in disarray and the tv is on the floor and possibly beyond repair, but Danny doesn’t want to deal with any of that, so he takes the other side of the couch instead.

“You sure you’re okay?” Steve asks, watching Danny hold the improvised cold compress to the side of his face.

“I’m great.” He adjusts the peas. He’ll have to keep his right eye closed, but it’s worth it if it means keeping it from turning black, blue or any other color his skin usually isn’t. “Why would you ask?”

Steve slants a sideways look at him, taking measure, and seems to decide that’s good enough. He turns back to the piece of A4 paper with its thirty entirely random-looking characters, and then he suddenly takes it in both hands and rips it in half, lines up the pieces and rips them in half again. 

The dry tearing sound sends Danny’s heartrate spiking much the same way as it did ten minutes ago when he found some balaclava’d guy rifling through Steve’s stuff. He makes a loud noise of surprise that comes out like a protest, and Steve looks at him like he expects more of that. Like he thinks Danny’s going to lay into him for making this choice.

“Huh,” Danny says, searching Steve’s guarded face, because he really, really isn’t going to do any of that, and if Steve thinks he will, he can wait a long time.

Steve doesn’t wait. He holds Danny’s eyes for a single moment of defiance, but when it dawns on him that he’s not going to need any of his bullheadedness, it drops away. He tosses the four pieces of paper on the coffee table in front of them. The cipher is still perfectly readable, but it’s the symbolism of it all that hits hard. Danny is still working through that, trying to get his brain to wrap around how he feels about this and if he can be furious at Doris all over again or if the fact that she’s already six feet under means that he needs to cut her some totally undeserved slack, when Steve starts tearing up the next piece of his own life with just as little warning as the last. 

“I have to move.”

“What?” Danny’s hand tightens on the tea towel and peas involuntarily. The plastic bag makes a crinkly sound. “Where?”

“I don’t know,” Steve says, which sounds honest, but seems to be his new catchphrase. Danny’s not sure he’s ever heard him say that so bluntly before today, at least not in a way that isn’t a prelude to a snarky comeback. Steve, as Danny knows him, doesn’t like admitting to shortcomings, and he would view a lack of information as a big one. “Somewhere. Anywhere.”

Danny feels panic claw at his throat. This is their conversation on the beach all over again, but worse. If this is what getting robbed and tearing up the paper has led Steve to, Danny now knows how to feel about it, and it’s things he couldn’t say in front of his kids. “Hey, that’s a little drastic, don’t you think? How many times have people broken in here, huh?”

“A stupid amount,” Steve says, which was Danny’s point – this is a SNAFU, sure, but nothing to get exceedingly upset about – except Steve is taking it as the stark negative it probably should be. That’s a new one. “Just last week, Hirsch was sitting right where you are now.”

Danny is floundering, completely off his argument game. He approaches his own point from a subtly different angle. “But that was a good thing, wasn’t it? That he could find you to ask for help, to clear his, his what was it-”

“His uncle.” 

Danny waves his free hand demonstratively. “Right, that guy. It’s a good thing Hirsch knew to come here, so you could connect him with Tani who solved a cold case murder mystery and cleared Hirsch’s uncle of any charges. You helped facilitate all of that. Lots of good.”

Steve huffs. It sounds unconvinced. “He could have called. I don’t need him sitting in-” Just like Danny, Steve waves a hand, but he’s not gesturing back at Danny, but at everything around them. The living room, in all its familiar glory. “You know, in my space. God, Danny, I need a place of my own. Something that’s mine.”

Danny’s eyes catch on his shoes by the door, the five books he’s smuggled onto the book shelf, and the place where he knows the small frame with the picture of Grace and Charlie that he put on Steve’s desk must have landed when it got swept to the floor earlier. There’s a sick feeling building in the pit of his stomach that has nothing to do with the beating he took. “Right,” he says, through a throat that feels too tight.

“I need to _move_ ,” Steve continues, oblivious to Danny’s distress. He sounds like he’s going in the opposite direction, finding that freedom he’s claiming he wants. “I need-”

Danny noisily slams the peas down next to the remains of the cipher. He should put them back in the freezer, but he can’t be fucked to care. “You know, if you need space, you could just ask me to move out. Junior’s basically living at Tani’s. It’d just be you and Ed.”

Steve looks at him, frowning. It’s nice to know he still registers as a blip on Steve’s radar. “What? No, man, it’s not you. It’s-” Danny can hear the _me_ that will follow and he’s ready to angrily fight the urge to feel even sicker at being served well-meaning platitudes, but then Steve continues with, “My parents. It’s my parents.”

“What?” Danny asks, because that doesn’t make any sense. There’s a million reasons a guy could want his best friend to buzz off once in a while, but his dead parents usually don’t make the list.

Turns out Steve is reading from an altogether different list. He scoots to the very edge of the seat, like he can’t settle down, and that, at the very least, is definitely Danny’s Steve. “They’re here, in every corner of this house. I see my dad every time I enter the garage-” A nod in the right direction. “-my mother every time I step on that floorboard-” Steve points at the rug by the back windows, the one that hides the floorboard that used to be loose before Steve nailed it down. Doris has done so much more crazy shit since then that Danny had almost forgotten about the diary she hid under the floor of this house for Steve to find years after he’d moved back in and just after his own mother left him behind once again. 

Steve is still going, pointing out the stuff he mentions, like Danny doesn’t know how to find every single little thing in this house blindfolded. “Those curtains in the kitchen, I’m pretty sure those were the last thing my mom ever bought before she faked her death. That’s my dad’s desk that’s still full of his stuff, my mom’s favorite chair is on the first floor landing in the reading nook, I sleep in a room where the only thing I’ve ever replaced is the mattress, I wash myself in their bathroom, and that dining table is the exact same one where my dad sat me down when he told me he was sending Mary and me to the mainland. These days I can’t even use the front door without thinking about the time he was late coming home from work and I kept staring at it thinking I could keep him safe with my _mind_ somehow.”

Danny lets Steve rant until he’s run out of steam. Then he gives him a moment longer, to get his bearings. “Ghosts,” he says, because he doesn’t have anything better to offer. “It’s a house full of ghosts for you.”

Steve scoots back so he’s sitting on the couch like a somewhat normal person again, but he’s shaking his head. “It’s always been that. But that used to be comforting, and lately it’s just like I’m- Trapped. Does that make sense?”

“Sure,” Danny says, because it doesn’t seem his place to tell Steve how to feel right now, much as he burns to do just that. This is all going wrong, so wrong.

“Mary moved on and built a life for herself and I got stuck here. I’ve never permanently lived anywhere else. I can’t do this anymore.”

“So you’re what, packing up all of your stuff and moving house? To Bali?” Danny can see everything they have collapse, unraveling like a sweater with a loose thread: it seemed so comfortable, but it got snagged on a nail that was never fixed and suddenly there’s only used string left over to get tangled in. He’s absently mused, in the past, whether he himself would ever want to leave if he could (no, the only answer has always been no), but he never expected Steve to seriously consider the same, let alone decide to cut his losses on the spot while Danny is still nursing a fresh black eye because someone wanted to get at a dead Doris’s secrets. 

It’s eerily perfect, he’ll admit. Doris McGarrett’s one last parting gift after a lifetime of playing with her family’s feelings.

Steve isn’t giving things as much deep thought, which is worrying. He sounds almost dismissive when he says, “You can’t move to Bali.”

“That’s brilliant,” Danny says, because it really is. The best and easiest way to get away from someone is to go somewhere they can’t follow. He’s never ever identified with the goofy blond hobbit in Lord of the Rings before this day.

“We could move into your place,” Steve says. He keeps throwing curveballs. Danny is getting damn tired of it, because he can’t catch any of them. He fumbled this one a month ago in black and white by putting his signature on a dotted line. 

“No, we can’t.” Steve will ask why and that’s inevitable, so he might as well get it over with and drop the bomb. “It’s being sublet. For at least another five weeks.” 

At the time he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong, because Steve told him he could stay as long as he wanted and he was still worried about Steve’s mental state, so he was planning on doing just that, the staying thing. Giving up his own house seemed like a step too far, but he has a kid in college and another one going to an expensive school and he can’t afford to waste money. In hindsight, he can see that it took some mental gymnastics to justify not communicating any of this clearly to Steve. 

Instead of throwing up a stink about this pretty giant thing Danny never told him, Steve just says, “Alright. So we’ll find a different place.”

And that’s the second time he says, but the first time Danny really notices that he said- “We?” Danny blinks harder than he should. The emotional whiplash of this conversation is going to keep him unsteady on his feet for longer than his actual injuries. “You want me to- You want me to come with you?”

Steve looks at him like he’s suddenly wondering if Danny shouldn’t be checked for a concussion after all. “Yeah. Did you not want-”

Danny laughs for no good reason. For a bad reason, even, because it’s really stupid, but his heart suddenly feels roughly one fuckton lighter. How can things that are this easy be so hard? “No,” he says, and then, because that was stupid too, “I mean yes. I mean I don’t not want- Whatever. You know what I mean.”

Steve’s eyebrows go up. He looks offended in a way that’s probably mostly play, but maybe not entirely. “What, you get to force me to put my feelings into words, and now you think you can just quit when it’s your turn? No way, Danny. You have to know I’m not about to let you get away with that.”

“This is not about _feelings_ ,” Danny flat-out lies, but badly, so it doesn’t count. “It’s about how you were saying things about needing to get away and then you were suddenly talking about moving, and it scared the crap out of me.”

Steve’s eyebrows get hiked up even further towards his shouldn’t-that-be-greying hairline, and that’s mischief, playing on his face, and Danny has no clue when all of this took such a sharp turn for the ridiculous. Ridiculous meaning Steve has the upper hand, for some reason, in a disagreement about articulating emotions. “Sounds like a feeling to me.” 

By this point, Danny feels things, alright. He feels like he wants to just throw in the towel and be done with it. “Yeah, okay, you caught me.” He raises his hands, palms out, the universal gesture of surrender except with an added inadvisable layer of sarcasm. “I care. I care about my best friend and I don’t want him to just go off half-cocked on his own without my sage advice and guidance.” 

“Wow,” Steve says, only goading Danny a little, “almost sounds like you’re a human being.”

Danny harrumphs. He sinks back into the couch, the one he’s not being kicked off of, and slings both arms along the back just for the hell of it. He’s tempted to kick his feet up on the coffee table, really make himself at home, but there are peas and discarded pieces of paper in the way. “So what about the whole going away soon? What happened to that?”

“I’m still going to do that,” Steve says, but he manages to avoid catapulting the conversation back into painful territory by not giving Danny a chance to reply. “I was never not gonna come back, are you crazy? You know I was joking, right, when I started dating Brooke last year and told you I was breaking up with you?”

Danny stretches out even further. Steve taking a break to backpack through Europe or scale a bunch of mountains in an effort to find himself will be weird, but manageable. Danny can live with that, so much so that he feels fine indulging Steve’s deflection. Truth is that Danny needs it, too. “Don’t think I don’t know you told her how important I am to you on your first date. Brooke and I, we’ve had some fun conversations about you at Charlie’s school.”

“Oh, God.” Steve collects the peas and the tea towel and gets up, possibly in a weak attempt to hide that he’s grinning and embarrassed. He leaves the paper just where it is. “You’re a piece of work, you know that? And I think my exact words were that I love you very much.”

Hearing Steve say that is like stretching out on a familiar couch for Danny’s heart. “I did warn you you had zero game,” he shoots back, because they can’t let this get too mushy all at once.

Steve, kicking Danny’s legs to get Danny to let him pass, doesn’t completely get the memo. “I also remember telling her we were basically married.”

Danny feels like laughing again. It’s bubbling up inside of him, like Steve is the Mentos to his coke in some kid’s third grade paper mache volcano project. “Good. Not gonna need any more game, then. You got me.” He watches Steve leave for the kitchen, probably to see if he can put those peas back on ice or if they’re going to be eating the entire bag of them tonight, but it’s okay – Steve will come back. In the end, he always comes back.

“Yeah,” Steve says, laughter in his voice too as he passes through the doorway. Danny can’t see him anymore, but he knows Steve well enough to know he’ll be gloating when he adds, loud enough for Danny to hear him no matter the distance and even in a different room, “After all, you’re my Danno.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!! Comments are wonderful, but either way you should imagine me sending lots of love your way. Stay safe and sane in these upside-down times. ❤
> 
> I’m on Tumblr as [itwoodbeprefect](https://itwoodbeprefect.tumblr.com), or with my exclusively H50 (and mostly McDanno) sideblog as [five-wow](https://five-wow.tumblr.com).


End file.
